ANN: Gorille 0.2

As the shift in Unicode handling between XML 1.0 and 1.1 seems relevant to
W3C internationalization work, I thought I'd post this here.

I'm happy to announce a second release of the configurable Gorille 
XML/Unicode character tester.  Like the earlier release, it uses XML-based 
configuration files to specify which characters should be permitted in 
particular XML contexts.  This version adds support for both namespaces and 
public identifiers, as well as an experimental SAX filter.

Gorille is a small Java package designed to let developers of various kinds 
of XML processors test the content and names of XML structures in their XML 
documents. While Gorille ships with test files for both XML 1.0 and the 
draft XML 1.1, you can create your own configuration files as well.

Gorille uses an XML format to specify lists of characters according to 
either XML 1.0 conventions (with its BaseChar, Ideographic, CombiningChar, 
Digit, and Extender productions) or XML 1.1 conventions (NameStartChar, 
NameChar). Both forms permit specification of the Char and S production for 
content characters and whitespace. I've included sample lists for both XML 
1.0 and XML 1.1, as well as an ASCII-only version of XML 1.0.

Gorille is now hosted at SourceForge, complete with mailing lists and CVS:
http://gorille.sourceforge.net

I would especially like to hear from developers who can give Gorille more 
thorough testing on a wider range of Unicode than I have been able to do so 
far.  The SAX Filter in particular needs some tire-kicking, as most SAX 
parsers already perform the XML 1.0 version of Gorille's tests, making it 
difficult to get large numbers of faulty events into Gorille.

Despite my interests in Unicode and character encoding issues in XML, I 
still live in a largely ASCII universe, and no doubt some subtleties have 
escaped me.

Contributions, bug reports, and general comments on the usefulness or lack 
thereof of this tool are all quite welcome.

Simon St.Laurent
Associate Editor, O'Reilly & Associates
http://simonstl.com

Received on Monday, 7 January 2002 15:34:07 UTC